Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of January 9, 2017

Due Dates / Upcoming Events

Monday, January 16 - No School, Martin Luther King Day

Tuesday, January 10 - Reading Logs due

Wednesday, January 11 - full day

Thursday, January 12 -  math journal pages: be all caught up

Friday, January 13 - Home Link due

General News and Announcements

Cubes

Rubik’s Cubes have made a huge comeback this year! This puzzle game is great fun for our 4th graders, and they are welcome to be used at school during these times: snack recess, outdoor and indoor recess, and bus dismissal. At other times the cubes must be stored in students’ lockers.

Help Wanted

I am looking for a parent to prep some materials (cutting paper and tracing circles) for an art project.  Time is completely flexible on Tuesday.  Please email Dena (dmcfarland@msad51.org) if you can help!

Academic Updates:

Reading Workshop

This coming week, students will start a research project!  More details to come!

Writing Workshop

Writers worked this past week to choose a topic and write five cause and effect sentences.  They typed their sentences on their Chromebooks in class, and we got everyone up and running in terms of printing.  I’ll create a rubric or scoring sheet of some sort and will include those grades in the first semester report cards, which will come home a couple of weeks.

Math

In math this week students were reintroduced to the partial products algorithm using 2 by 2 digit multipliers. We also worked on multiple step story problems using a process where they first estimate the answer, write a number model with an unknown (which becomes their plan for solving the problem), doing the work to arrive at a final answer and then looking back to compare their answer to their estimate to judge if their answer makes sense. It seems like a lot of steps, but the process makes sense and the students did well with some guided practice.

Theme

In theme this week students have listened to the continuing saga of Jamestown through the novel Blood on the River. They also started to make plans for their next STEM project which is to build a lookout tower measuring a minimum of 12” in height and having a platform that can hold the weight of an apple. Construction will start on Tuesday!